Lost
by SigmaTheta
Summary: She adapts to what her life becomes. (Daud's mother backstory. Written for Trick or Treat 2018.)


There is no one who will take her home.

She does not know the value of the unfamiliar coins she has stuffed her pockets with, but every ship captain scoffs at the handfuls she offers, says the journey is too long, too dangerous, takes them too close to that cursed and evil continent to be risked for one silly woman with so little to offer.

In her arms, the infant begins to fuss and cry, the heat of the day, the roaring of the crowded port, and the furious tremble of his mother's hands too much for him. Her shoulders slump in a moment of defeat, and she moves off to the shaded side streets to soothe the child.

He has no name yet. She was taught that children are only named once their mothers believe they might survive.

Once he quiets, her hand slips into her pocket to clutch again at the coins there. If it is not enough to get her home, it must at least be enough to take her somewhere else. The ship that stole her away returned to this port under very strange circumstances. The remaining crew members were too frightened to speak against her, at least for a time, but she knows she cannot stay here long. Soon she will be hunted again.

She has seen the market stalls around here. Dried herbs and fruits and insect parts are plentiful in this country, and some even look familiar to her.

She will find a way to earn more coin. She will find a way back home.

* * *

Her son learns thieving nearly before he learns to talk, always watching her nervous, furtive customers with his too keen eyes, picking up trinkets and coins fumbled from purses in their urgency to pay and be gone from her home quickly.

She holds her hand out to him afterward – her own eyes are plenty keen, too – and Daud silently places whatever prize he has taken into her outstretched palm. Frowning, she pinches his cheek hard and says, "Those quick hands of yours are going to get you into trouble someday, child."

But she always pockets what he takes. It is hard to make a lesson stick when they need the coin so badly.

When he was still a baby, she told him stories of home, sang him the songs she'd learned in her own childhood, promised she would get them both back there someday. Now it is only the stories and the songs she lets slip. He is old enough to realize she cannot keep the promises.

It does not take long for Daud to grow bolder, bolstered by his success and natural talents. Soon he is out long hours, running with the other boys on their narrow street and bringing home ever greater prizes taken right from pockets and homes and shops. It makes her fret, knowing each coin she cannot refuse is a chance for catching notice they do not need.

Then comes the night that he does not come home at all.

Asking the guards or Overseers for help will gain her nothing but a noose around her neck, she knows, hanging in the square for witchcraft, and her neighbors are unlikely to be much better. How fearful this country is of something it understands so little of. Few here have ever seen the horror of true black magic.

She searches on her own until sun up, when she finally gives in and knocks on the door of Alena, her nearest neighbor and the only one to sometimes speak to her willingly.

Alena's hands shake, but she does not slam the door. She fears her as much as any of them, but she owes a debt and knows it well. Herbs to ease the pain of a troublesome pregnancy, sold cheaply out of sympathy for the bruises on her face, and half a year later, sold in whispers in the dead of the night, the poison to make her a widow.

"Kids have been taken off the streets around here last few weeks. They say it's gangs moving in, that they like the kids for thieving, being so small and quick" Alena offers in a mumble, her eyes never rising from the floor. "I ain't seen your boy around, but…"

It is all she needs to hear to know she has lost him.

* * *

It is sheer coincidence that she is in Karnaca when the posters go up on all the walls.

They say what troubles Dunwall troubles the world, but the first hint of plague shut that city down so thoroughly that few outside it even knew they had lost an empress until long after her successor was already crowned.

Another week and she would have been gone from this place, always moving, always dodging back to the smaller towns, where even such a grand assassination would be old news before it ever reached that far. She might never have known more.

Instead, she catches sight of the scowling portrait and bold block lettering on her way back from the market stalls, and she freezes in her tracks.

It is the name more than the picture that first draws her eye. Who else in this frightened country would give their child so strange and foreign a name? The man sketched below is a stranger to her, but what chance is there that he could be anyone else but her son? The longer she looks, the more familiar he seems.

She trails her worn and weathered fingers over the scarred face as she reads through the list of crimes, the incredible reward on offer for capture or death.

Maybe it would have been better never to see. She's managed fine through all these long years of wondering, keeping her head down and earning her coin bit by bit, and it is clear that Daud is still as lost to her now as he ever was.

"Oh, child," she says quietly, letting her hand slip back to her side as she steps away. "I warned you."


End file.
